Roll out the barrel ... a classic from Lake Keuka, New York in the 1910s. Photograph: Transcendental Graphics/Hulton/Getty

Postcards are back. Hip Hip Hooray. Saucy, silly, studied, slushy, satirical, they all have their place on our collective doormat. Here is a great and much loved postal institution that had seemed to be in terminal decline with the arrival of instant email and abrupt txt msging. Sales in Britain did indeed plummet in the first years of this century, but the latest figures show that we're posting them with the kind of gusto that you might have thought had gone out of fashion when the British abandoned their kiss-me-quick coastal resorts for, cheap flights and holidays in half-built concrete hotels on the Costa del Watteva.

Could this revival be a reaction to our prodigious emailing and txt msging? Very possibly. Postcards need to be chosen - a large part of the fun - handwritten and dropped into an old-fashioned letter box with a stamp in place that itself demands a special trip to a Post Office (an exceedingly rare building type in new digital Britain). They demand that bit more effort from the sender than texting, which is partly why they are fun to receive. They're also one of the very few forms of handwritten correspondence dropping through letterboxes today.

Above all, postcards are heartwarming and a chance to have a bit of fun. British seaside resorts are still lined with shops and stalls selling traditional "saucy" postcards. The drawings are usually dreadful and the jokes even worse; but their nudge-and-a-wink style seems almost refreshing in a world when swearing, being smart-alecky and downright nasty have become the norm especially in msgs relayed by email. The best (if that's the right word) of these are undoubtedly those by Donald McGill (1875-1962) who was taken to court in 1954 accused of obscenity. This might seem ridiculous to us now. One of the offending postcards showed a young lady saying to a bookmaker at the races "I want to back the favourite, please. My sweetheart gave me a pound to do it both ways". McGill was found guilty; the judge and jury must have had dirty minds.

Equally enjoyable are the kind of postcards the photographer Martin Parr has made a point of collecting over many years. In 1999, he published edited lowlights of his collection - cards printed in hideous and even slightly out-of-register colours depicting the latest municipal bus station, glum holiday camps and even stretches of empty new motorway - in a quietly funny book Boring Postcards. It was a bestseller, in Britain anyway.

Sending postcards of the wrong place is somehow still funny - "This is us having fun on Morecambe Bay" written on the back of a postcard showing showing German soldiers forming human pyramids somewhere on the Baltic c.1935 (and, no, this will never be funny to anyone outside the British Isles and especially not to Germans) - while drawing your very own pictures on blank postcards is a true luxury for their recipient. I cherish postcards drawn by the late railway historian and journalist Cecil J Allen who sent happily intricate drawings of trains to his Edwardian fiancée; her London address is written along the sides of railway carriages, in fields along the tracks and among gantries of semaphore signals. These are evidently signs of true love and even - taking my cue from Donald McGill - a steamy romance.

Will the postcard revival last? I hope so, for postcards give us all a chance to be fond and funny and to show that we care about their recipients simply because they require that little bit of extra, enjoyable, effort to send than "lol" txt msgs and emails. They look fun pinned up on walls, stuck in albums or published in books by Martin Parr. And, now that even the prime minister, Mr Brown, is to take his family holiday on the Suffolk coast rather than in the exotic villa of some dodgy Italian politician or veteran pop star, the British at least are likely to be cutting back on holidays abroad and sending postcards home from Southwold, Southend and Scarborough instead.